Case Study

Living Direct

About Living Direct

Living Direct is an online retail company, specializing in consumer appliances, indoor air quality products, and lawn and garden furniture. Living Direct strives to make online shopping as easy as possible by carrying all the home appliances needed to turn a house into a home including many private-label products.

Their Business Challenge

As an exclusively eCommerce home appliances retailer, Living Direct relies on superior customer experiences as a means to differentiate from the competition. Improving the customer experience is key to their goal of making shopping for large items online as easy as possible.

The delivery and returns experience was identified as a core area in need of attention. The large items that make up a significant portion of Living Direct’s products have unique needs shipping to customers via a variety of carriers which all have disparate tracking experiences. Furthermore, large items require delivery appointments to be made with customers, which often result in delays for getting items into the shoppers’ home and confusion around scheduling a delivery appointment.

Returning large items was equally as cumbersome often involving significant time and communication required from the carrier, customer and customer service representative to create a return, a BOL document and schedule the pickup. Living Direct knew improving these experiences was imperative to their long-term goals.

The Convey Solution

In April 2016, Living Direct engaged Convey to tackle some of these issues head on. Living Direct began by taking advantage of Convey Engage’s branded delivery tracking page to unify the post-purchase communication experience across their multiple modes and carriers. As an added benefit, feedback collected from customers on the tracking page has identified opportunities to improve product packaging; allowing Living Direct to further to optimize how items arrive at the customer’s doorstep.

Simultaneously, Living Direct launched Convey Initiate’s returns module for processing return requests with more efficiency. The returns module optimizes the carrier decision for cost while also removing the significant amount of time required to identify the appropriate carrier, generate a BOL and schedule the return pickup with the customer. The dynamic nature of the decisioning tool ensures the optimal carrier decision is made regardless of changes to carrier mix and rates. In fact, Living Direct has seen the percent of shipments handled by a single carrier shift by as much as 76% over the course of the last 6 months.

Living Direct is continuing to find value by extending their usage of Convey’s Delivery Platform. Living Direct is currently launching a customer-facing enhancement of the Initiate returns module which will allow shoppers to initiate the returns process, schedule the pick up and download the BOL documents online without the need to interact with a customer service representative.

The Result

Enhanced Customer Visibility and Communication

32%

shoppers who subscribe to SMS notifications

63%

shopper feedback on the delivery experience that is positive

Improved Returns Processing Efficiency and Cost Savings:

34%

average cost savings on freight returns through carrier optimization

Time Savings

processing returns by internal team members

“

Convey’s Delivery Platform has allowed us to continue to improve the post-purchase experience our large-item shoppers. We are excited about the opportunities we have to continue to leverage Convey’s delivery intelligence to continue to improve the experience by addressing common return complaints with our white label product manufacturers, offering more personalized delivery options to shoppers in cart, and identifying loss-leading and damage prone lanes.